The front lines of WAR.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

They were college students and police officers. They came from office cubicles and construction sites. But in 2004-2005, they were ground troops in Iraq.

Though it's been little-recognized, members of the Oregon-based Second Battalion of the 162nd Infantry saw more combat than any other U.S. National Guard unit since World War II.

To military historian John Bruning, their experiences cried out for a book that would let other Americans know just what these 850 citizen-soldiers accomplished, lost and endured during their yearlong deployment.

"Fate threw them into the most important battles in the Iraq war during 2004-05," Bruning declared in his forward to "The Devil's Sandbox." The Oregon unit's deployment began, he wrote, just when "the Iraq war morphed into something greater than itself. It became a titanic test of wills between America and the forces of Islamic fascists. The battlefields in Iraq became our generation's Guadalcanal and Stalingrad."

Bruning, whose first published book chronicled the life and World War II death of Eugene fighter pilot Ged Johnson, uses a similar "you are there" narrative in this book. He based his accounts on interviews with 365 members of the `2-162' and their families. That breadth shows how much the soldiers came to trust Bruning, Sgt. 1st Class Vinni Jacques of Albany said.

Jacques said he and others initially agreed to talk to Bruning with the understanding he would "hold off before writing anything." After only a few hours, however, they warmed to the book project.

"I told him, as long as some of the money goes toward helping the kids who don't have dads anymore, you have my full support," Jacques said.

Bruning did his homework, said Jacques, who was wounded in Iraq and now leads a Guard soldier reintegration team.

"He interviewed multiple people for every one of the incidents he describes," Jacques said, calling the account "as good as you can get it."

The book puts readers in a Humvee turret with Spc. Spike Olsen as he rolled into the Battle of Najaf to confront violent Mahdi militia members. He conveys the sense of surrealism that gripped Olsen, who'd enlisted to pay his way through Western Oregon University, as his column rolled along a road like an "asphalt conveyor belt" into the rocket salvos and crackling AK-47s ahead.

It conveys the chaos as the 2-162 was ambushed on its way into the country and Sgt. Luke Wilson became an amputee in his first five minutes of combat. The Hermiston man's transport was a "Jed Clampett" - a truck fortified with plywood and makeshift sandbags because not enough armored Humvees were available. A rocket easily pierced the makeshift armor to take off Wilson's lower leg.

Bruning's multi-sourcing allows him to recount the June 4, 2004, deaths of three Portland-area soldiers from several vantage points - all excruciating. He first describes Lt. Eric McCrae and combat lifesavers Justin Linden and Justin Eyerly running "terribly exposed" to the rescue of total strangers: New Jersey Guardsmen injured when an improvised explosive device (IED) detonated beneath their passing Humvee.

"They did so in the middle of an ongoing firefight without any thought for their own safety," Bruning writes.

That's when the watching attackers detonated a second bomb. Sgt. Bill Thompson was among those who saw a Humvee-sized fireball fell McCrae, whom he'd first known as a 6-year-old boy.

Sgt. Kerry Boggs, a Lane County Sheriff's deputy, had to weave around three bodies to drive a medic to the wounded McCrae. Only later, when the medic handed him two dog tags, did he realize his own men - the "Two Justins" - were among them.

Back at the battalion aid station, Silverton science teacher Sgt. Maj. Brunk Conley and Spc. Joe Fleischman took up a terrible load - body bags containing their fallen friends.

"Brunk had to do it, he felt it was his duty," Bruning writes, but "every step of the way was sheer anguish." In the morgue, commanding officer Col. Dan Hendrickson wept and apologized to these first Oregon Guardsmen killed in action since 1945. Afterward, he faced something even harder: calling the dead soldiers' families, one by one.

Bruning lets readers taste the battalion's anger, as well - their outrage upon learning that the June 4 bombings were the work of four Iraqi brothers, "mercenaries in their own country," hired by insurgents to attack the Americans. Readers feel their bitterness when they learned this: Imbedded with the attackers were three Iraqi photojournalists - a Reuters videographer and two still-camera stringers for U.S.-based Associated Press - who were filming as the bombs detonated. Thanks to that videotape, family members and other Oregonians saw the deaths of Linden, Eyerly and McCrae on the evening news.

He also includes the perspective of family members at home. Jacques' wife, Rhonda, watched the Reuters photographer's footage, which ended with images of a crowd celebrating the ambush, and "exploded with rage."

"How dare they do this when we are trying to help them, to make their lives better?" Bruning quotes her thinking.

The images also angered Rebekah-mae Bruns, a Cottage Grove Sentinel photographer before deploying to Iraq as a public affairs officer for a brigade serving with the 2-162. She directed her wrath - and professional expertise - toward bringing their attackers to justice. Using the Internet, she furiously downloaded every image the three photographers had filed. Some included enough identifying information that the Oregonians could capture the bombers.

Telling his story through the eyes of the soldiers, Bruning takes a definite point of view - one he has come to share.

"I had misgivings about the initial invasion, but I supported Bush and I supported the military," he said. "And once we got into the whole war in Iraq, I realized we can't pull out until we get things stabilized because if we do, hundreds of thousands of people will die, and on our hands."

In 2004-05, he said, "The war morphed into something larger, like the U.S. Civil War in 1862 morphed into something different with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation." The Oregon soldiers were fighting mainly "Iranians, Syrians, Chechens, Saudis, Jordanians," not Iraqis, he said.

"Fundamentalists have coalesced around the Mahdi army, and Iraq has become the main battlefield in a titanic test of wills between the forces of Islamic fascism and the United States."

But the stance doesn't prevent him from including other perspectives. His account of the 2-162 capturing the four brothers in a house filled with IED-making materials includes Sgt. Randy Mitts noticing a stoic little boy among the bombers' sobbing, pleading family members. "No tears, no panic. He just went inside to face a life without his dad."

"Well," Mitts reflects, "there's our future terrorist right there."

Nor does Bruning's support of the U.S. war effort prevent him from disclosing in a last-minute appendix an Oregon soldier's recent discovery: An Iraqi Ministry of Interior official, who publicly accused 2-162 soldiers of overreacting by confronting Iraqi police running a torture chamber at the ministry, was an American. Steven Casteel was a former Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence chief hired by the Bush administration to run the ministry.

Before Hendrickson's superiors ordered him unequivocally to leave the crammed, feces-filled prison, the Oregonians did their state proud. They confronted the jailhouse abusers, gave water and medical care to the battered, dehydrated captives, and pleaded with the U.S. command to let them right a situation that was far worse than Abu Ghraib.

Such principled stands were another reason Jacques agreed to participate in Bruning's book.

"The soldiers I was with there - they're just amazing. I owe my life to them. And the state should be proud that we have these people walking around in our communities."

The Devil's Sandbox By John Bruning (Zenith, $24.95, 320 pages) What: Book signing and panel discussion Who: Author John Bruning and several Oregon Iraq war veterans profiled in his book When: 2 p.m. today Where: Eugene Barnes & Noble, 1163 Valley River Drive